macOS 11 Big Sur on Unsupported Macs Thread

[Barry K. Nathan]

I wonder if my fairly new ssd is starting to fail as I am getting mismatch errors when performing first aid after erasing the drive I have must have atlases partition/formatted the ssd 50 times and same with my usb flash drive in the last week trying to get my wifi working as I installed Catalina which I also have on my internal hdd and to bots faster than on the ssd after I installed apple updates reboot took 15 mins to boot up slow as a slug and the external ssd is the only one I have to test Big Sur on

I think you said in an earlier post that you're using some kind of Seagate adapter or something that dates back to the "XP/Vista" days. I think it's more likely that's the part that's failing, probably due to old age (at least, most of my docks and adapters from that era have died in the past few years).

You might want to give this Best Buy store brand enclosure a try. Yes, at $30 it's a bit expensive compared to some, and it's not the fastest (because it lacks UASP -- although it's still going to be much faster than any USB 2.0 adapter), but drive installation is very easy and I have found these to be very reliable.

Best Buy: Insignia™ 2.5" Serial ATA Hard Drive Enclosure Black NS-PCHD235

Shop Insignia™ 2.5" Serial ATA Hard Drive Enclosure Black at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Price Match Guarantee.

www.bestbuy.com

 

[jhowarth]

Is it my imagination or was support for 'csrutil authenticated-root' removed from csrutil in beta 2? A usb installer created from the beta 1 installer supported that in the terminal but not for a usb installer created from the beta 2 installer.

 

[TimothyR734]

Is it my imagination or was support for 'csrutil authenticated-root' removed from csrutil in beta 2? A usb installer created from the beta 1 installer supported that in the terminal but not for a usb installer created from the beta 2 installer.

I have used it to install beta 2 I could not get it to work on phase 1 of the install or the amfi get out of my way in nvram but after it rebooted to start phase 2 the 29 or so install I booted into the the usb and entered csrutil authenticated-root disable and nvram boot-args="-no_compat_check amfi_get_out_of_my_way=1" and it worked

 

[haralds]

View attachment 933575
[automerge]1594667151[/automerge]
It is listed macOS Big Sur - data I think only the update appears and the Big Sir-data is hidden to try to prevent us from tampering with the OS

I would suspect the volume format not recognized issue and not hiding the Update volume will be fixed in the next Catalina rev. A little sloppy they did not address this earlier, since internally they knew about the changes.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

Is it my imagination or was support for 'csrutil authenticated-root' removed from csrutil in beta 2? A usb installer created from the beta 1 installer supported that in the terminal but not for a usb installer created from the beta 2 installer.

Seems to work for me (sorry for the bad quality photo, the room was bright and I was trying not to get too many reflections in the photo):

Spoiler

 

[haralds]

I guess I fixed in different way the "sudo mount -uw /" for my BigSur Beta 2 installation, it should work even with "csrutil authenticated-root enable" , only condition to make it working is to have this :

nvram boot-args="-no_compat_check"

nvram csr-active-config
(w%00%00%00)

csrutil disable

I simply used bless on the BigSur Preboot Volume and this seems ignored any snapshot booting.
In few words use the attached script, better if you run it directly from BigSur , and after reboot select BigSurFix
and from normal booting, open terminal and type: sudo mount -uw / ; killall Finder
you should have an unsealed non-snapshot BigSur System .

edit:
if doesn't worked maybe check these additional steps:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...unsupported-macs-thread.2242172/post-28667064

How are you able to execute
nvram csr-active-config
(w%00%00%00) ??
I installed Big Sure on a supported system and then moved the disk to my Mac Pro 5,1 already running Catalina. It has an updated WiFi BLE and EFI patched RX-580. I cannot get into recovery and Catalina Recovery would not allow me to set nvram car-active-config

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

I just released v0.0.11 of my patcher. No big changes in this release. If you've already used v0.0.9 or v0.0.10 successfully, there's no need to update yet. (If you weren't successful with v0.0.10, there's a chance that v0.0.11 will provide clearer error messages.)

Hopefully I'll do at least one more release later this week with more substantial changes.

GitHub - barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher: A primitive USB patcher for installing macOS Big Sur on unsupported Macs

A primitive USB patcher for installing macOS Big Sur on unsupported Macs - barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher

github.com

 

[jowaju]

Been there and done all that , apples disk utility can't even do a clone of BS like it use to on other OSX. I even tried another clone tool ( i forget brand but was apple format ) with the same effect.

I just used this to successfully clone a Big Sur installation to another drive. This was a USB attached SSD Big Sur booted OS. It cloned the drive to another USB attached SSD. I then powered off the unit, completely removed the original booted Big Sur drive, and booted to the newly created Big Sur drive, again connected USB to a non supported Mac. Seemed to work with no issues.

chris1111/ASR-Clone-SSD-macOS-Catalina-Big-Sur

Contribute to chris1111/ASR-Clone-SSD-macOS-Catalina-Big-Sur development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[Alex-Microsmeta]

2012 Retina 15" confirmed with WiFi (probably been done already) View attachment 933548

....And graphic acceleration with Nvidia! Or is achieved by Intel HD graphic 4000?

 

[TimothyR734]

How you able to execute
nvram csr-active-config
(w%00%00%00) ??
I installed Big Sure on a supported system and then moved the disk to my Mac Pro 5,1 already running Catalina. It has an updated WiFi BLE and EFI patched RX-580. I cannot get into recovery and Catalina Recovery would not allow me to set nvram car-active-config

Do you have a Big Sur usb installer or a Catalina usb installer that you can access the terminal

 

[Alex-Microsmeta]

Step 16 is in grey because I haven’t found a solution to that problem. Acceleration isn’t working. WiFi & audio will randomly not work on some startups, and I have to redo the patches.

I’m gonna wait it out…it’s fun, tinkering with Big Sur – but it can be time consuming.

Same here, yes it's funny

 

[LuisN]

....And graphic acceleration with Nvidia! Or is achieved by Intel HD graphic 4000?

Mine is "stuck" with Nvidia even though the intel4000 kext is loaded, it just doesn't switch GPUs.

 

[Mystere65]

https://parrotgeek.com/bigsur/ I followed this installation method, but when the installer window appears, if I click on next nothing happens, I have an iMac 21.5 Late 2013 ... maybe something wrong?

 

[Alex-Microsmeta]

I just used this to successfully clone a Big Sur installation to another drive. This was a USB attached SSD Big Sur booted OS. It cloned the drive to another USB attached SSD. I then powered off the unit, completely removed the original booted Big Sur drive, and booted to the newly created Big Sur drive, again connected USB to a non supported Mac. Seemed to work with no issues.

chris1111/ASR-Clone-SSD-macOS-Catalina-Big-Sur

Contribute to chris1111/ASR-Clone-SSD-macOS-Catalina-Big-Sur development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Have you launched the Cloner from Big Sur? I tryed to clone BS from Catalina, but It returned me an error on source: BS SSD (impossibile to convalidate)

 

[Larsvonhier]

Mine is "stuck" with Nvidia even though the intel4000 kext is loaded, it just doesn't switch GPUs.

You could try to disable the Nvidia by NVRAM directive (not to be confused with boot-args).
See dosdude1´s and other ppl info on how to disable "defective" discrete GPUs. Works the same, no matter if defective or just "unwanted" due to missing driver/framework support... ;-)

 

[jackluke]

Jackluke, how did you prune off your snapshots? Did you do it while booted from the same Big Sur snapshot? My understanding is that once tagged for removal, 'unmount -uw /' should work upon reboot even without deleting the snapshot. However that didn't work on my unsupported machine.

I done from normal booting (since I used sudo for any command) with "csrutil authenticated-root disable" (without opencore), and the machine was a supported APFS HighSierra (but unsupported Mojave mac) with recent IOUSB , don't know exactly how I did, eventually will replicate it on next beta 3 , but interrupting (from alt-option apple startup manager) a BigSur stage3 installation forcing power-off, is a method that I tested too and worked to deny the system volume sealing (and consequently snapshot booting).

From an USB BigSur Installer (or its Recovery) I also don't have any diskXsYsZ snapshot volume even when system volume is sealed from normal booting.

 

[jhowarth]

I done from normal booting (since I used sudo for any command) with "csrutil authenticated-root disable" (without opencore), and the machine was a supported APFS HighSierra (but unsupported Mojave mac) with recent IOUSB , don't know exactly how I did, eventually will replicate it on next beta 3 , but interrupting (from alt-option apple startup manager) a BigSur stage3 installation forcing power-off, is a method that I tested too and worked to deny the system volume sealing (and consequently snapshot booting).

From an USB BigSur Installer (or its Recovery) I also don't have any diskXsYsZ snapshot volume even when system volume is sealed from normal booting.

Okay, so now that you have an unsealed installation of beta 2 and can 'mount -uw /' successfully again, does that allow a legacy usb prelinked kernel to be built under beta 2 using the approach to patch IOUSBHostFamily.kext.orig/Contents/Info.plist and IOUSBHostFamily.kext.orig/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBHostPlatformProperties.kext/Contents/Info.plist instead of adding LegacyUSBInjector.kext? As I said before, that approach definitely works under Catalina so it should also work under Big Sur.

 

[jackluke]

Okay, so now that you have an unsealed installation of beta 2 and can 'mount -uw /' successfully again, does that allow a legacy usb prelinked kernel to be built under beta 2 using the approach to patch IOUSBHostFamily.kext.orig/Contents/Info.plist and IOUSBHostFamily.kext.orig/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBHostPlatformProperties.kext/Contents/Info.plist instead of adding LegacyUSBInjector.kext? As I said before, that approach definitely works under Catalina so it should also work under Big Sur.

Under BigSur a patched Info.plist for this AppleUSBHostPlatformProperties.kext or this IOUSBHostFamily.kext , doesn't worked, or if partially worked only using CMD+S and "exit" to continue booting, once someone figure out a valid method to use "sudo mount -uw /" for any BigSur installation, then you can make your own "legacy usb" tests.

I made earlier a patched BigSur BaseSystem.dmg but only worked with recent IOUSB mac .

Apple this time made a tough BaseSystem.dmg (with APFS Preboot embedded).

 

[jhowarth]

Under BigSur a patched Info.plist for this AppleUSBHostPlatformProperties.kext or this IOUSBHostFamily.kext , doesn't worked, or if partially worked only using CMD+S and "exit" to continue booting, once someone figure out a valid method to use "sudo mount -uw /" for any BigSur installation, then you can make your own "legacy usb" tests.

I made earlier a patched BigSur BaseSystem.dmg but only worked with recent IOUSB mac .

Apple this time made a tough BaseSystem.dmg (with APFS Preboot embedded).

Does prelinked kernel builds using the LegacyUSBInjector.kext under a snapshot-less beta 2 still work? The fact that the kext usb drivers are coupled to dext user-land ones makes it possible that this may be permanently broken at this point if Apple made incompatible changes.

 

[TimothyR734]

https://parrotgeek.com/bigsur/ I followed this installation method, but when the installer window appears, if I click on next nothing happens, I have an iMac 21.5 Late 2013 ... maybe something wrong?

is your SIP disabled ?

 

[jowaju]

Have you launched the Cloner from Big Sur? I tryed to clone BS from Catalina, but It returned me an error on source: BS SSD (impossibile to convalidate)

Yes, I launched the cloner from within Big Sur, it was the actively booted Big Sur SSD drive, and it successfully cloned it in use to another USB SSD drive.

 

[jackluke]

Yes, I launched the cloner from within Big Sur, it was the actively booted Big Sur SSD drive, and it successfully cloned it in use to another USB SSD drive.

Can you use "sudo mount -uw /" from your source Big Sur SSD ?

Because if not and that tool makes a Big Sur clone with a sealed system and snapshot booting then it's great.

 

[Mystere65]

is your SIP disabled ?

Yes sure

 

[TimothyR734]

Yes sure

maybe try this method https://github.com/barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher

 

[BitVolcano]

ok, so here is my current dilemma...

I've used several different methods to try to get Big Sur up and running on my 2010 15" MacBook Pro, which included all of the hax methods, the ParrotGeek method, making a usb to boot off of, and the git hub micro patcher from barrykn. Yet, whenever I restart to try to install, My Mac goes into a boot loop trying to load the installer. it gets to the apple logo, and then restarts, and this happens over and over again. It would be much appreciated if someone could assist me in some way, as I've been trying to get BS up and running since the day after WWDC.

Thanks to who ever helps me